Washington had intended to withdraw from politics when his first term ended in 1792. He asked James Madison to draft a valedictory statement, but, when the time came, bickering among some of his cabinet, especially between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, convinced him to run again. He set the original document aside.
When 1796 rolled around, he was weary and determined to leave politics. He enlisted Hamilton to revise the statement, to which he added his own observations. Although the document is known as Washington’s “Farewell Address,” Washington did not deliver it orally. Instead, he had it published in Claypoole’s American Daily Advertiser in September 1796, about ten weeks before the election to choose his successor.
It was widely disseminated and became, in the words of the historian John Avlon, a sort of “civic scripture,” more reprinted even than the Declaration of Independence in the early years of the republic. During the Civil War, both houses of Congress began to hold annual readings of the document. The House abandoned the practice in 1984. The Senate continues the tradition to this day, selecting a senator (and alternating between parties) to read the document aloud on the Senate floor to commemorate Washington’s birthday. In 1956, the Minnesota senator Hubert Humphrey wrote that every American should study this memorable message. “It gives one a renewed sense of pride in our republic,” he suggested. “It arouses the wholesome and creative emotions of patriotism and love of country.”
Several passages from the address have become inscribed on the collective memory of the nation. But what struck me rereading the 6,000-word statement is how much it appears as a period piece, a blast from an apparently unrecoverable past. Anyone who has read the Farewell Address will recall Washington’s stirring warnings against “the fury of party spirit” and foreign entanglements, his cautions against excessive debt, and his insistence on the place of religion as the foundation for civic order. The question is: what relevance do such injunctions have in present-day America?
Until recently, I would have said that the main strictures and recommendations of the Farewell Address retained but a rhetorical claim. Then, in 1796, Washington’s exhortations and admonitions had purchase in the political, economic, and moral reality of America. Now, they mostly echo like antique sentimentalities, more or less like the phrase “with liberty and justice for all” in the Pledge of Allegiance. Who still takes that seriously?